Archive for the ‘Andrew Klavan’ Category

The Los Angeles Times is giving the cold shoulder to global warming skeptics.

Paul Thornton, editor of the paper’s letters section, recently wrote a letter of his own, stating flatly that he won’t publish some letters from those skeptical of man’s role in our planet’s warming climate. In Thornton’s eyes, those people are often wrong — and he doesn’t print obviously wrong statements.

“Simply put, I do my best to keep errors of fact off the letters page; when one does run, a correction is published,” Thornton wrote. “Saying ‘there’s no sign humans have caused climate change’ is not stating an opinion, it’s asserting a factual inaccuracy.”

What amounts to a ban on discourse about climate change stirred outrage among scientists who have written exactly that sort of letter.

“In a word, the LA Times should be ashamed of itself,” William Happer, a physics professor at Princeton, told FoxNews.com.

“There was an effective embargo on alternative opinions, so making it official really does not change things,” said Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism at The Rockefeller University in New York.

“The free press in the U.S. is trying to move the likelihood of presenting evidence on this issue from very low to impossible,” J. Scott Armstrong, co-founder of the Journal of Forecasting and a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told FoxNews.com.

It starts off by mocking Scalia, but misses his point on the topic discussed.

The acerbic Scalia, the court’s longest-serving justice, got his latest comeuppance Wednesday morning, as he tried to make the absurd argument that Congress’s renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 2006 by votes of 98 to 0 in the Senate and 390 to 33 in the House did not mean that Congress actually supported the act. Scalia, assuming powers of clairvoyance, argued that the lawmakers were secretly afraid to vote against this “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” …

Scalia was not about to surrender his title of worst-behaved justice. He mocked the civil rights law as he questioned the government lawyer. “Even the name of it is wonderful,” he said. “The Voting Rights Act: Who is going to vote against that?” (Verrilli cautioned him not to ignore actual votes of Congress in favor of “motive analysis.”)

That’s entirely how laws are named. The Patriot Act wasn’t named the “Waterboarding Act”, and the current NY near-total gun ban that will make no one but criminals safer is called the NY SAFE Act. Just a quick glance at Wikipedia can show that there are some pretty valid criticisms of the law, which are in no small part why it’s in front of the Supreme Court. Maybe Scalia could assess it a little more solemnly, but his conduct is head and shoulders above the leftist “Shut Up!” arguments of “wise race” Sotomayor and “Kevin James” Kagan.

Wednesday’s voting rights case was typical. Surprisingly, the five conservative justices seemed willing to strike down a landmark civil rights law (the provision that gives extra scrutiny to states with past discrimination) that was renewed with near-unanimous votes in Congress. Conservative jurists usually claim deference to the elected branches, but in this case they look an awful lot like activist judges legislating from the bench.

The purpose of the Supreme Court is to look at law within the framework of the Constitution and rule on its Constitutionality. If a “landmark civil rights law” applies unequal protection under the law – which is what “extra scrutiny” to specific states implies, then it may well be unconstitutional. Activist judges create law out of nothing. Rejecting illegitimate legislation is the purpose of SCOTUS. This is exactly the opposite.

Kagan is choosier about when to interject herself, but she’s sardonic and sharp-witted. (“Well, that’s a big, new power that you are giving us,” she said, mockingly, when a lawyer tried to argue that the justices should overrule Congress’s discrimination findings.)

That’s exactly the power of SCOTUS – to overrule bad legislation. That’s not just mocking, it’s stupid.

Sotomayor allowed the lawyer for the Alabama county seeking to overturn the law to get just four sentences into his argument before interrupting him. “Assuming I accept your premise — and there’s some question about that — that some portions of the South have changed, your county pretty much hasn’t,” she charged. “Why would we vote in favor of a county whose record is the epitome of what caused the passage of this law to start with?”

She doesn’t accept the premise, doesn’t like the South, and holds the standard leftist opinion of the South – that it’s all a bunch of racists (which was arguably true back when Democrats owned the South). She didn’t wait for the arguments, she just threw out her own biases.

From earlier in the piece:

In an opinion this week, she harshly criticized a Texas prosecutor for a racist line of questioning.

From MSNBC, this strange sentence that identifies her ethnically and then goes on to criticize identifying people ethnically:

The country’s first Latina justice released a rare statement on Monday, ripping the Texas prosecutor for trying to “substitute racial stereotype for evidence and racial prejudice for reason.” …

Assistant U.S. Attorney Sam Ponder asked during the trial, “You’ve got African Americans, you’ve got Hispanics, you’ve got a bag full of money…a light bulb doesn’t go off in your head and say ‘This is a drug deal?’”

“Assuming you accept her premise – and there’s some question about that – that some ethnic groups have changed since stereotypes about them were made, well, these people pretty much haven’t… Why would we vote in favor of a group of drug dealers who are the epitome of what caused this stereotype to begin with?” – Bizarro Sotomayor

She could be a bigot when it’s convenient, but like all leftists, it goes along with which is the acceptable ethnic group to despise in their constantly rotating revolution for social justice.

“The problem with those hypotheticals is obvious,” she said, because “it’s a real record as to what Alabama has done to earn its place on the list.”

“The problem with those hypotheticals about the blacks and Mexicans in a drug deal is obvious”, Bizarro Sotomayor said, because “it’s a real record as to what those people have done to earn their place.”

Sotomayor continued questioning as if she were the only jurist in the room. “Discrimination is discrimination,” she informed him, “and what Congress said is it continues.”

And then there’s Kevin James from King of Queens again:

Moments later, Kagan pointed out that “Alabama has no black statewide elected officials” and has one of the worst records of voting rights violations.

That’s strange. I can find black state officials pretty quick – in fact, the first on the Alabama governor’s cabinet is. There are black state congressmen, but considering that there are only a handful of posts that might qualify as “statewide elected officials” – and I didn’t go through all of them to double check, that’s kind of an interesting barometer to judge a state as racist.

The whole piece details the interruptions and refusals to listen that come from “wise racist” Sotomayor and Kagan, while trying to tell us to begin with what an interrupting jerk Scalia is.

At one point, Justice Anthony Kennedy tried to quiet her. “I would like to hear the answer to the question,” he said. The lawyer got out a few more sentences — and then Kagan broke in. …

But Scalia’s mouth was no longer the loudest in the room. When the Alabama county’s lawyer returned for his rebuttal, he managed to utter only five words — “Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice” — before Sotomayor broke in.

This is the leftist “Shut Up!” argument coupled with talking over people as a means to steamroll any opposition and ignore any discussion. This does not bode well for limited government or the Constitution.

Sally Kohn, an leftist activist/community organizer, “think” tank organizer, and media figure (sort of, as an unpaid sometimes contributor on FOX), had this wonderful tweet to share with the world, as tonight’s presidential debate included mention of Fast and Furious:

200+ dead people, including a massacre of teenagers in Mexico, two dead US federal agents, a coverup by the Obama administration that can’t be denied, including use of executive priviledge, Oversight and Reform still investigating criminal conspiracy by the adminstration, and the left resorts to their old argument of “SHUT UP!”

Milton Friedman on economics, the free market, individual choice, and the labor market.

One of the first things to consider is something that was mentioned waaay back here (on the old site):

Minimum wages hurt the worker. They protect politicians, who can say “I’m giving you a raise” while they spend employers’ money. Except what’s missed is that those employers may have wanted to create more jobs, rather than a few expensive ones. Second and third order effects, broken windows, etc.

One thing that Milton Friedman misses in his analysis of illegal immigration is that there is also a question of nationality involved. In the case of large demographic groups moving that aren’t identifying with their new nation, especially for a melting pot nation like the US, it results in Balkanization. People coming to a new nation who start by violating its laws, or who only come for work, don’t really care about the host nation – they have no loyalty and do not identify with their new nation. They aren’t citizens of the US as a nation-state, they are simply illegal aliens. The welfare state aspect is part of a reason for rejection of illegal immigration, but there is much more, including that it is sometimes part of an action by other nations against the US, such as Mexico’s vehement support of its own criminal citizens against US authorities and Mexico’s quest for remittance income, or the ideas of greater Aztlan reconquista. (Of course there’s more than just illegal immigration from Mexico and the Americas, but that’s a very large part.)

With regards to unions, there’s the important note that unions just pit workers against another group of workers. They’re a guild, an organization that demands you pay them in order to sell your own wages. In the case of public sector unions, they pit employees of the taxpayers (government employees) against taxpaying citizens. Andrew Klavan went over this a while ago.

But we could go on about how the unions screwed over bondholders in the bailouts, how the unions were politically bailed out by Democrats when GM and Chrysler went down, how the unions protect criminals in their midst, and so on, but the unions are really only there to protect themselves – against anyone else. Again, Buggy Whip Manufacturers’ Local 554.